Cultural Experience: Horniman Museum and Gardens

Earlier in the week, I decided to head with a friend to a museum which was out of the city, which was a little more off the beaten track (I found it in an article about 'quirky' museums). Basically, that means it's not the Tate/National Gallery/British Museum/Natural History Museum, etc. And it was totally worth it!

The Horniman Museum was founded in 1901 by Frederick John Horniman, whose family owned a large tea business. This meant he could be a collector and he opened this museum, specialising in anthropology, natural history and musical instruments. It is almost entirely free to visit, with only 2 paid exhibits (the aquarium and the butterfly house).

We started with the large downstairs room, which was all about the animal family, how animals are related and the different animal families. It featured a lot of taxidermy animals as examples of different animal families, but even featured specimens in jars and this which demonstrated different brain sizes in animals (rat vs. pigeon vs. cat vs. monkey), and vascular systems and other creepy but cool stuff! I found it fascinating, to be able to see different complexities of animal and how complex internals organs were. It was very cool.

After that we found the room I'd heard about, which was a room of musical instruments. There were hundreds and hundreds of different examples of instruments!!! Everything from flutes to trumpets, string instruments, even harps and examples of keyboard instruments. It was so so fascinating to see all the different instruments from around the world, and how they are related despite sometimes coming from different continents. They even had a 17th century violin which was beautifully engraved! You could sit at a desk, and select an instrument by it's display number to hear what it sounded like as well... Such a great rom for anyone into music.

Then we had lunch (reasonably priced museum cafe, yay!), before going for a stroll through the extensive gardens. There is a lot of grass area for picnicking, playing and hanging out, but also paths around different areas, concrete for riding bikes around, and a few planted gardens. I loved the pumpkin patch, with many different pumpkins (some were really big!), and the medicinal plant garden which was very educational!

All in all, would highly recommend, especially with children. Only thing to point out, it's not super central (it's south, near Forest Hill station)... And if you ride your bike there like I did, there is an awful lot of hill. You might die. I was certainly very sore afterwards!